"The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act sets up a system through which the US government can blacklist a pirate website from the Domain Name System, ban credit card companies from processing US payments to the site, and forbid online ad networks from working with the site. This morning, COICA unanimously passed the Senate Judiciary Committee."

The most surprising of these is Al Franken, one of only three US senators known to use a computer.

Wow, Al Franken voted for this?

Assuming there were an open debate about this, I'm sure somebody told them how easy it would be to work around the DNS issue, and they went for it anyway? I'm not quite as cynical as some might be, so I assume that at least their heart was in the right place on this. But even assuming they're just being paid off by the content industry, even the content industry can't be stupid enough to think this is actually going to work?